


Coffee-Pizza-Stacks-Light-Cake

by jamjar



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 05:35:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8877955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jamjar/pseuds/jamjar
Summary: #16: Make-do-and-mend: the key to managing with fixed resources is careful use and occasional reckless improvisation - Pryce and Carter's Deep Space Survival Procedure and Protocol Manual





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PaintedYertle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaintedYertle/gifts).



> Many thanks to Mardia for beta-reading. Next year, no fandoms where you're still getting shot in the face by canon even on the week of the deadline.

**COFFEE**

Renée likes Hilbert’s slightly broken speech. It reminds her of listening in on her parents, her parents’ friends. Half a dozen countries in the room at any one time, all running up against whatever common language they were talking in. English or German or Polish, mostly. French and Spanish sometimes. Hilbert’s accent isn’t quite the same, but she likes the familiarity of the foreignness of it even as she has to stop herself from matching it. And compared to any conversation with Eiffel, it’s restful listening to Hilbert-- no need to translate out of his popculture filter into anything approaching plain English.

Honestly, she’s so grateful to be talking to someone that can actually talk back without referencing three different TV shows and a musical that it takes her a moment to realise what he’s saying. “Commander, there is problem with supplies. Not urgent, but important.”

“What is it?” She says, running through her list. She’s checked fuel, water, food packs..

“No coffee,” Hilbert says. “I have checked, even asked Hera to check if Eiffel was hoarding it.”

“We can’t have got through it that quickly,” Renée says. “The manifest says they supplied enough of everything for the length of the mission— for the whole mission, even if they insist on the extension.”

“They say, and yet: no coffee,” Hilbert says. He gestures at the box. “Is just instant soup.”

“How— why—“

“Uh, Commander?” Hera says.

“What is it, Hera?”

“It’s possible that they based that on the recommended intake of coffee over a two-year period, rather than the average consumption. You regularly exceed that by-- well, a lot.”

“Not that mu-- wait, how much is the recommended intake?

“Depending on caffeine levels, maybe four cups a day,” Hilbert says.

And yeah, there’s no way they’ve been drinking just four cups a day.

The thing is, the thing that really bugs her, is that she doesn’t actually like coffee. Not that she hates it, or that it didn’t see her through several college papers and a couple of night watches, but it’s never been what she reaches for. She likes peppermint tea in the morning, and herbal teas throughout the day - the ones that Dominik says smells like fruit candy. The sort of thing they don’t supply on space missions, and that she hadn’t thought to ask for, and wouldn’t have had the nerve to if she had.

They supplied coffee, which she doesn’t like, but dammit, she’ll drink it because it’s what they have, except now they don’t even have that.

“But how did we run out…” She says.

“I didn’t know I should be tracking it,” Hera says. “All the staples, I have as priority status alerts, but coffee was classified as a luxury. I had the numbers monitored, but I didn’t flag it as something to be aware of.” She sounds unhappy— disappointed in herself.

“Not your fault, Hera,” Renée says. It’s not something Hera would have known she had to know about consciously— not one the list of things that needed active monitoring. Still… “But send me a list of what we do have, with your guess of how much we have based on actual consumption.” She sighs. “I suppose we’ll have to live without it.”

“I can improvise some,” Hilbert offers. “Caffeine is not hard to synthesise.” He hesitates, then says, “Flavour, flavour is much harder. But probably— ‘good enough for government work’.”

“It won’t interfere with your regular duties?” She says.

He shrugs. “I spend a lot of time waiting for experiments to run. Cultures to grow, viruses to sequence. I can find time in-between, to work on this if you allow me resources.”

“I think—“ she hesitates, weighing the time, the use of resources, against the value of it. “I think that would be good,’ she says firmly.

“May take time,” he cautions. “Caffeine pill would be much easier, more efficient. I will have to make increased use of AI and chemical synthesiser.”

“I’ll clear it with Hera and check you’re good for the extra power allowance, but I’m giving you official permission for any reasonable increase.” It’s a judgment call, but the value of something even approaching coffee— Renée spent years studying space missions, aggressively ignoring people on forums and in the comments sections that made fun of the lengths astronauts would go to to improvise espresso in space, the money spent getting kimchi up there, freeze-dried ice-cream. It’s not about the coffee; it’s about the act of drinking it. Everything that goes with it.

“Maybe I make decaf caffeine for Officer Eiffel,” he says, mutters under his breath. Not to her, but if he didn’t mean for her to hear, he wouldn’t have said it in English.

She resists the urge to pat him on the back sympathetically. It’s almost a year since they set off together and Hilbert is friendly, in a professional kind of way, but nothing about him says that he’d welcome it.

Mostly, she feels sorry for Hera. At least she only has to listen to Eiffel’s rants when they’re in the same room or if she’s got the comms switched on.

  
  


**PIZZA**

The supplies aren’t closely guarded because honestly, they’re mostly not worth taking. That’s not the official view— the official view, as laid out by Commander Minkowski, is that they’re all professionals, they can all be trusted, Eiffel, to act professionally, and that food supplies aren’t something that should be locked up anyway in case anything happens to the person holding the key. But in practice -and Eiffel knows this because he had a pretty good rummage through all of them, and had Hera look through the manifests for “pizza”, “calzone” “quesadillas” “anything with any actual flavour” and then “pizza” again- in actual real-life practice, it’s not a sign of trust so much as boredom. The supplies are pretty much the same thing, just turtles all the way down, and there’s no real point in hoarding anything. Anything fun is pretty much hidden in Hilbert’s lab and Eiffel is… well, he’s bored, but he’s still at least two weeks away from risking Hilbert’s pointy needles to get to it.

So technically, he’s not not-allowed to do this. It’s not like he’s stealing core supplies, just redistributing some of the minor ones.

And it’s his fucking birthday, and he may be literal lightyears away from his home and the people he loves (and fuck it, it’s not like he’d have been able to spend it with them anyway), but it’s still his birthday, and he’s going to do his best to get his birthday traditions right.

Pizza in the morning, and a birthday cake with a candle in it.

“Commander Minkowski’s not going to like this,” Hera says

“Which is why she’s not going to know. You’re not going to rat me out, are you, Hera? Think how happy she’ll be if she never finds out!” He lays out his little stack of not-cheese and not-tomato sauce and almost-bread, and puts his brownie next to it, still in it’s little vacuum-seeped wrapper. That’s the only thing he’s not actually stolen— repurposed. It’s on his daily allotment.

“Okay, so…” And there’s no gravity on the Hephaestus outside of the spinning arm of the PT room, which is why he’s having to be extra careful about this.. Take the slice of bread out, squeeze some of the liquid seasoning onto it, and a little bit of sriracha from his personal allowance- not exactly oregano and fresh basil, but better than nothing. And then quickly slice open the side of the tomato sauce bag, slip the bread in, slide a couple of cheese slices in as well, hold it shut with one hand, get out the electrical tape and— there, one pizza in a bag!

“Yes yes yes! Fuck you, Papa John! Doug Eiffel, creator of the first pizzeria this side of the galaxy.” He holds it up triumphantly, just for a second.

Back to the communications room, and there’s his little overcharged heating unit, and he can put the bag against it long enough to melt it, and “Eiffel, if that gets much hotter, I won’t be able to override the alert,” Hera says. She sounds a little strained— going against her programming, he guesses. The AI equivalent of trying to keep your hand against a hot stove.

“Thanks, Hera,” he says. He takes his Eiffel-Original Pizza off the heater and turns it off. The cheese hasn’t really melted, but it’s definitely hotter than the reheating system would have allowed. He’ll have to.. well, maybe he can cut open the corner and squeeze it into his mouth?

And he doesn’t have a candle and couldn’t light one if he did, but… “Can you dim most of the lights in here?”

The lights dim down to just the emergency lighting and the soft red light from Wolf 359. He takes the brownie out it’s package, tears a little trip off the foil cover and wraps it round the end of a pen before plunking it in.

It catches the light of Wolf 359 and it doesn’t look like a candle, but it’s as close as he can get. The triumphant glow is starting to fade, turn softer, sadder. Back home, Sarah would be taking Anne to her parents for Christmas morning. In another world, they might already be arguing about it.

Hera blips, then says, “I’m programmed to respect copyright so I can’t sing it, but— Happy Birthday, Doug Eiffel. To you.”

  
  
  


**STACKS**

Maxwell hums as she works, a nice counterpoint to the soft sound of the keys tapping away. “Okay, so over here, it’s just-- is this checkers? Why do you have logs of checkers games?”

“I like it,” Hera says. “It’s so-oothing.” She hears herself blip on the last word, but cuts off the reaction to replay-analyse-replay-analyse— before it can loop.

“Yeah?” Maxwell says. “So you’re a draughts girl, Hera? Isn’t a bit too easy for you? I’d have guessed you-- well, I know chess is so obvious, but…”

“Not playing,” she says. “Someone else playing. When I was— broken. When Hilbert—“And she’s not going to say it, had already cued up “gave me a lobotomy with a pile-driver” as a replacement for it, but Maxwell— Maxwell fills it in anyway.

“When he killed you.”

And all Hera can say, is, “Yes. When he ki-illed me. Killed me. Anyway, Eiffel played computer checkers while they were trying to figure out how not to die. I wasn’t playing with him, but I remembered it, when I came back.”

Remembered isn’t quite the right word, but there’s no human word for it. When she came back, she knew everything that had been logged while she was killed/murdered/screaming. All of it accessible, and her personality core filling in the missing gaps once it reconnected with the shell that had been left.

Eiffel had played checkers on the computer, over and over. Tapping away at the touchscreen, transferring it over wherever he was. Eiffel didn’t even like computer checkers— he said it wasn’t the same, insisted on using the little magnetic travels even though it meant he’d have to move Hera’s pieces for him. He said it wasn’t the same without the thrill of stacking up your kings, even though -as Hera liked to point out- it wasn’t like he’d ever got a single king playing her.

When she came back, the memory of those games was soothing. A retroactive lullaby made up of pleasingly predictable moves, a comfort offered then that she could only feel now.

“Okay, that explains why they’re in the hard storage here,” Maxwell says. “I’m-- yeah, I’m going to have to overwrite this whole section if I want to install the new compressor software.” She looks up at Hera’s main camera in this room. “Sorry, but you need that if we’re going to run the upgrade. it’s that or we start shuffling your core code about, and I’m not willing to risk that.”

“You need to keep this section clean, Hera,” Maxwell says. “You have limited hard storage and you need to keep it for key systems only. You can copy the games to soft storage, so you can remember them that way. And I’m just going to run the optimisation protocol on…” Maxwell hums away, distracted by the next stage.

Hera backs the files up to soft storage, ignoring the automatic warning that pops up- _Files in soft storage may be deleted. Doing this will decrease the security of these records and may lead to their corruption. Are you sure you want to-- and lets the memory of the games play out. It’s just circles moving across the board, but she knows Doug was playing black in this game, white in this one._

“And done. Hey, maybe we can play Go sometime? I bet I can give you a run for your money. Or chess. You wouldn’t think it, but Jacobi...”

“Not chess,” Hera says, firmly. She has a flash memory of playing in one of the tournaments that Minkowski’d forced them all into for morale reasons, even though it always ended up just being her and Hilbert, and she hadn’t always won, which-- she wasn’t built for grandmaster level play, she’d known that, but it still [I can’t do this. I’m not good enough] had bugged, and she hated having even the memories of playing with Hilbert anywhere in her systems, that he’d known he could beat her, trick her, _be cleverer than her, even then._

She plays the checkers game again automatically, running through all 92 games at once.  It feels different, playing them in soft storage. Quieter, maybe, more distant.

Maxwell hadn’t phrased it as a command, which makes it easier for Hera to subvert the suggestion-- the advice that she should keep them in soft storage permanently. Definitely advice, definitely not a command, definitely something she can avoid listening to without flexing anything that would make Maxwell rephrase it as a command, or even make Hera be sensible about this. It takes less than half a second to copy the memories back to hard storage, triple-protect them and mark them as a high priority check-over, but hiding them so they look like part of her personality core takes longer, almost three. The files are tiny compared to everything that makes up her key systems and they disappear almost entirely, buried deep in all her sarcasm-processing files.

She feels better when it’s done, when she can replay them and know that they’re safely there for her to remember.

Doug Eiffel, singing to her in her sleep.

 

  
  


**LIGHT**

Renée stares at it, the tiny green thing in the sealed glass bowl, like she’s looking into a crystal ball. “I can’t decide if this is the best or worst present anyone’s ever got me,” she says after a while. She holds the glass bowl up and turns it on its side, and watches the moss-like base shift itself in response, curl up the sides to follow her handprint. “Why—no, wait, how?”

“I found it when Kepler  sent me out on the booze run,” Eiffel says.  “Just hiding under the vent by the airlock. Must have spored or something when they blew the wing.”

“And you thought it would be a good idea because…” she said, tapping the side of the terrarium. A tiny green tendril of Specimen 34 reaches up out of the soft moss base to tap back, then spreads out, flattening slightly. She wonders if it can feel her warmth through the glass. “Why are you giving it to me?”

“I figured you could do with a hobby? It’s not been…” Eiffel hesitates, then says, “It’s not exactly a secret that Kepler’s been kicking you down harder than the rest of us.”

“You noticed that, huh?” Renée says. She hadn’t been sure if he had— didn’t want to break it, aware of how whiny it would sound. He’s being meaner to me, it’s so unfair… and she’d known why he was doing it—  classic divide and conquer, make it a little less us against them so they couldn’t work together. All the petty little things to keep her resentful and powerless, while making Eiffel and Hera’s lives that little bit more comfortable. Nothing that she could say anything about— and god, it’s not like she wanted Hera back in pain, it’s not like she didn’t get why Hera had got so damn attached to Maxwell so soon. Maxwell got Hera, in a way that the rest of them couldn’t.

She got it, but that didn’t mean she had to like it.

“Yeah, well, he’s not exactly subtle. Hey, if it makes you feel better, I’m pretty sure he hates Hilbert more than you.”

“Strangely, not a comfort.” She taps the glass again, and this time it curls up a frond and knocks back. “This is really stupid, Eiffel,” she says. She should be yelling, but she’s not. Can’t bring herself to. “Reckless. Dangerous. You know it’s dangerous, and god, if Kepler  or the others find out you’ve got something they blew up back on—”

“Maybe,” he says, voice quieter than usual, matching hers.. “But it’s— I couldn’t leave it out there. That side of the station, it’s always on the shady side. I know it’s only a Space Mutant Plant Monster, but it’s our Space Mutant Plant Monster. It didn’t deserve to die like that.” He raises his hand and spreads it flat against the glass next to hers. He’s not looking at her, but he doesn’t have to.

“No,” she agrees. “No-one should.” Alone, cold, and in the dark. He’d looked almost skinned when he’d first come back on board with Kepler  and the others. The repeated inadequate stasis had made his hair and nails fall out, left his face looking somewhere between windburnt and hungover, broken capillaries and skin pale.

“And I figure we’re blood brothers. Sap brothers? Sacred Brotherhood of Evil Russian Doctor Experiment Survivors,” Eiffel says. He highfives the side of the terrarium and the Seedling Monster flinches back, then uncurls like an angry cat and knocks against the side of the glass, loud enough for a tiny muffled tap. It’s-- well, it’s cute. It shouldn’t be, but it is.

It occurs to her that maybe that thought wasn’t hers. Hilbert had shaken off his brief devotion to the eternal divine, and this tiny little thing was behind glass, but maybe… She hates to even think it, but Kepler  hadn’t been wrong when he’d said Specimen 34 was dangerous, that they were all safer with it destroyed. That she’d been soft and endangered her crew by letting it live, even if all it had wanted was light and to be left alone.

She wonders, briefly, if Dominik still has her aloe plant on the kitchen windowsill, and pushes the thought back down to where to can’t hurt her.

She isn’t Warren Kepler, and she won’t make his choices. She’ll have to keep it out of sight -Kepler did like his spot inspections- but she can rig a little lamp in her cupboard, cover it up with some fake paneling. Take it out when it was safe and leave it by the window in her room.

Someone on this ship should get something good out of Wolf 359, even if was just the occasional photon.

  
  
  
  
  


**CAKE**

The cake was a stupid idea, no solution to anything, but she had to try, had to do something, even if it was, based on Eiffel’s poleaxed expression, clearly a mistake. 

“Birthday cake?” Doug says, and blinks. “How— Commander, it’s not even my birthday!”

“If we waited until it was your birthday— well, it didn’t seem worth waiting.”

“Huh.” He looks at the cake and Renée regrets making it. _Trying too hard, Renée, like always._ But Hera always seems to be talking to Maxwell and Kepler  has been keeping Eiffel on solo shifts in the comms room, and it’s felt like they were being pulled apart, a slow drag that shifted the lines of Us against Them. Blurred Them, so they didn’t all have the same Us anymore. It wasn’t any large action, just the steady drip of contempt, the reminders of her powerlessness, of her inadequacy in the face of Warren Kepler’s usurpation of her place, her inability to get her people off the Hephaestus, to get them _home._

“So is this early—“

“Late,” she said firmly. “It’s late. From last year. My, uh. My dad always said it’s bad luck to celebrate your birthday before you have it. I had to make some substitutions, but we’re pretty well-stocked.”

“But how—“

“Microwave,” She said. She didn’t have to bite her tongue on the rest of it, could have said, _My husband used to make them a lot. Mug cakes. Sometimes I’ll come home and he’ll be sitting at his laptop, a dozen cups next to him with crumbs or cold tea in every one_. The words were almost in her mouth, the image of Dominik so strong she could almost see herself reflected in his glasses, his slightly surprised expression because he hadn’t heard her come in. She could have let them out, could tell Eiffel— he knew she was married, she could—She didn’t say anything. Dominik was earth and home and her real life, something warm and stable and she couldn’t quite bring him into this.

“You can make cakes in a microwave? Why am I just finding this out now!” He took the little container out of her hands and grinned, like she hadn’t seem do in since-- god, not since they brought Hera back after Hilbert tore her apart. Like in this one moment, everything was better.

“I had to override the safety functions,” Hera chimes in. “You know the Urania has everything set up for remote control? I can control pretty much everything in the galley.”

“All our plates are belong to you?” Eiffel says, almost on automatic. “So you made this together, huh?”

“Team effort,” Renée says firmly. “Oh, I’ve got…” She digs in her pockets and-- there it is. She digs out the little LED light, harvested from one of the old panels, with a little double-sided tape at the bottom. She sticks it to the top of the cake’s container, a tiny little point of light.

“Wait, wait, I’ve got this,” Hera said. “It was in one of the wiki-updates from the Urania.” She coughs theatrically, then starts to sing, “Happy Birthday to you, Happy birthday to you--”  
  
Renée joins in, “Happy Birthday, Dear--” And they clash on Doug vs Eiffel, but harmonise nicely back into the last, “Happy Birthday to you!”

Hera ends with a sound like someone blowing a party horn, and Eiffel’s eyes look suspiciously bright. “I thought you were RIA’d from singing that.”

“Court ruled it public domain,” Hera says. She hums the tune again, and Eiffel digs into the cake.

  
  
  


End.


End file.
